It is an anomaly of objective scholarship that so many different and often mutually exclusive opinions have all claimed to be an exposition of the teaching of St. Thomas, to say nothing of the long and bitter disputes, dating from the sixteenth century, and often generating, unfortunately, far more heat than light. Even in the past forty years, while the bitter tone of polemic has mostly disappeared, a host of varied and contrary exegeses of the Angelic Doctor's doctrine of Divine Providence has been offered to the philosophical and theological world.